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Q-learning is widely used algorithm in reinforcement learning community. Under the lookup table setting, its convergence is well established. However, its behavior is known to be unstable with the linear function approximation case. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

The $Q$-learning algorithm is a simple and widely-used stochastic approximation scheme for reinforcement learning, but the basic protocol can exhibit instability in conjunction with function approximation. Such instability can be observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright

Offline-to-online reinforcement learning harnesses the stability of offline pretraining and the flexibility of online fine-tuning. A key challenge lies in the non-stationary distribution shift between offline datasets and the evolving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Letian Yang , Xu Liu , Yiqiang Lu , Jian Liu , Weiqiang Wang , Shuai Li

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn policies from previously collected datasets without exploring the environment. Directly applying off-policy algorithms to offline RL usually fails due to the extrapolation error caused by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Chenjia Bai , Lingxiao Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhihong Deng , Animesh Garg , Peng Liu , Zhaoran Wang

Trained recurrent networks are powerful tools for modeling dynamic neural computations. We present a target-based method for modifying the full connectivity matrix of a recurrent network to train it to perform tasks involving temporally…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-07-04 Brian DePasquale , Christopher J. Cueva , Kanaka Rajan , G. Sean Escola , L. F. Abbott

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown significant promise for sequential portfolio optimization tasks, such as stock trading, where the objective is to maximize cumulative returns while minimizing risks using historical data. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Haochen Yuan , Minting Pan , Yunbo Wang , Siyu Gao , Philip S. Yu , Xiaokang Yang

Quadratic programming is a workhorse of modern nonlinear optimization, control, and data science. Although regularized methods offer convergence guarantees under minimal assumptions on the problem data, they can exhibit the slow…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-18 Jeremy Bertoncini , Alberto De Marchi , Matthias Gerdts , Simon Gottschalk

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have successfully been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. One dominant component of recent deep reinforcement learning algorithms is the target network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Lin Shao , Yifan You , Mengyuan Yan , Qingyun Sun , Jeannette Bohg

Q-learning played a foundational role in the field reinforcement learning (RL). However, TD algorithms with off-policy data, such as Q-learning, or nonlinear function approximation like deep neural networks require several additional tricks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Matteo Gallici , Mattie Fellows , Benjamin Ellis , Bartomeu Pou , Ivan Masmitja , Jakob Nicolaus Foerster , Mario Martin

To accumulate knowledge and improve its policy of behaviour, a reinforcement learning agent can learn `off-policy' about policies that differ from the policy used to generate its experience. This is important to learn counterfactuals, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt

Adversarial training (AT) has proven to be one of the most effective ways to defend Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) against adversarial attacks. However, the phenomenon of robust overfitting, i.e., the robustness will drop sharply at a certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Shudong Zhang , Haichang Gao , Tianwei Zhang , Yunyi Zhou , Zihui Wu

The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance without considering risk or safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning aims to mitigate or avoid unsafe states. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Zahra Shahrooei , Ali Baheri

This paper introduces two simple techniques to improve off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. First, we formulate off-policy RL as a stochastic proximal point iteration. The target network plays the role of the variable of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Marco Maggipinto , Gian Antonio Susto , Pratik Chaudhari

A great variety of off-policy learning algorithms exist in the literature, and new breakthroughs in this area continue to be made, improving theoretical understanding and yielding state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-31 Mark Rowland , Will Dabney , Rémi Munos

In this paper we revisit the method of off-policy corrections for reinforcement learning (COP-TD) pioneered by Hallak et al. (2017). Under this method, online updates to the value function are reweighted to avoid divergence issues typical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Carles Gelada , Marc G. Bellemare

Unraveling the reasons behind the remarkable success and exceptional generalization capabilities of deep neural networks presents a formidable challenge. Recent insights from random matrix theory, specifically those concerning the spectral…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-10 Xuanzhe Xiao , Zeng Li , Chuanlong Xie , Fengwei Zhou

This paper introduces Q-learning with gradient target tracking, a novel reinforcement learning framework that provides a learned continuous target update mechanism as an alternative to the conventional hard update paradigm. In the standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Bum Geun Park , Taeho Lee , Donghwan Lee

Practitioners often rely on compute-intensive domain randomization to ensure reinforcement learning policies trained in simulation can robustly transfer to the real world. Due to unmodeled nonlinearities in the real system, however, even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-27 Gabriel I. Fernandez , Colin Togashi , Dennis W. Hong , Lin F. Yang

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has had incredible achievements on high dimensional problems, yet its learning process remains unstable even on the simplest tasks. Deep RL uses neural networks as function approximators. These neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Riccardo Della Vecchia , Alena Shilova , Philippe Preux , Riad Akrour

Adversarial training, which is to enhance robustness against adversarial attacks, has received much attention because it is easy to generate human-imperceptible perturbations of data to deceive a given deep neural network. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-02 Dongyoon Yang , Insung Kong , Yongdai Kim